Data Center Power

Data center power and cooling costs are growing concerns for leading technology companies that host dense data centers that run massive numbers of workloads. They are looking for innovative ways to provide cooling and energy savings to data centers.

In a revolutionary development recently, Intel (News - Alert) successfully tested Green Revolution Cooling's CarnoJet System after housing servers for a year in mineral oil, eWeek reported. Intel officials submerged servers in mineral oil as a way to keep the systems cool.

Green Revolution (News - Alert) provides CarnoJet System mineral oil cooling system to keep servers running much cooler than traditional air-cooling technologies. According to Green Revolution Cooling officials, the CarnoJet System can reduce data center power consumption related to cooling by as much as 95 percent, and the total energy consumed by half.

In the CarnoJet System, the servers are put into the GreenDEF mineral oil, which absorbs the heat created by the machines. The heated coolant is then drawn by a pump module, where it's then filtered and cooled before being put back into rack systems housing the servers. Green Revolution offers server racks of 10U (17.5 inches), 42U (73.5 inches) and 60U (105 inches).

The mineral oil cooling is found safe for servers and their components from hard drive to processors. After a year-long test in the mineral oil, Intel sent the systems to lab for analysis and found they are absolutely fine. Intel’s trial with Green Revolution Cooling will help drive innovations in data center power and cooling, according to experts.

Mike Patterson, senior power and thermal architect at Intel, said server racks that are cooled by traditional air technologies operate with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.6, while the PUE rating for Intel servers that were submerged in Green Revolution's GreenDEF mineral oil coolant were between 1.02 and 1.03.

It’s still unclear whether Intel will adopt the Green Revolution technology for its own data centers eWeek reports. According to Patterson, the technology is still in the evaluation phase, seeing how housing the systems in the coolant impacts performance and other metrics.

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